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Sexting High Among Black, Hispanic Teens; Experts Disagree on Impact

06
Mar 2013

More than 20 percent of black and Hispanic teens say they have used their cellphones to send a “sext” message showing a nude or semi-nude photo or video of themselves to another person, and more than 30 percent say they have received such sext messages, according to a new study.

The research was done by University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and funded by the Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Department of Health Services. Why the focus on the two groups?

“Although sexting among U.S. youth has received much popular media attention, there are only limited data on its prevalence among ethnic minority youth,” say the researchers in their study, published online journal, Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.

In the university study, the results “indicate that sexting is prevalent among ethnic minority youth,” the researchers said.

And while the authors acknowledge that more research is needed to understand the context and circumstances of that sexting, “the first step in any public health inquiry is to understand the scope and prevalence of a potential health problem. Some data exist on the prevalence of sexting among youth in general. However, prevalence data for ethnic minority youth specifically are scarce.”

The researchers’ data is based on findings from 1,034 tenth-graders from a “large, urban school district in southeast Texas.”

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/sexting-high-among-black-hispanic-teens-experts-disagree-impact-1C8638599

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Illegal imigrant activity waning in Phoenix area, officials say

20
Dec 2012

The number of drophouses discovered by law-enforcement agencies in the Valley has decreased significantly over the last four years, further indication, federal immigration-enforcement officials say, that human smuggling in Arizona is waning.

Federal immigration officials found 490 illegal immigrants in 37 drophouses in the Phoenix area last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, compared with 3,221 illegal immigrants found in 186 drophouses in fiscal 2008, the peak year, according to statistics provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Matthew Allen, special agent in charge of ICE investigations for Arizona, attributed the decrease in smuggling activity in Arizona to an overall decrease in illegal immigration because of the weak U.S. economy, tighter border security, stepped-up immigration enforcement, and tougher sentences imposed on smugglers who hold illegal immigrants hostage inside drophouses.

But while the number of drophouses discovered in the Phoenix area has decreased, there are signs that some of the illegal-immigration traffic may have moved from Arizona to the Rio Grande Valley at the southern tip of Texas, Allen said.

ICE officials say the typical way station is a vacant house with no beds or furniture. Armed smugglers stand watch over dozens of illegal immigrants who are crammed inside and who sleep on the floor in squalid conditions.

Scenes like this were commonplace four years ago, when the Phoenix area was the drophouse capital of the nation.

Hundreds of drophouses dotted neighborhoods throughout the Valley. They were used by smugglers to hold groups of illegal immigrants awaiting transport to other cities after being brought across the border from Mexico.

“The number of drophouses fluctuates with the volume of traffic, so as traffic has gone down, so has the number of drophouses gone down,” Allen said.

He added that when the economy turned sour, many of the industries that relied on illegal aliens no longer needed them, which added to the decrease in unauthorized workers crossing the border.

“Those are also the years in which we saw a very significant increase in (Department of Homeland Security) resources in Arizona,” he said. “ICE has grown a lot in that period, and (Customs and Border Protection) has grown a lot in that period, and to a certain extent, that application of resources on the border has had an impact on traffic in Arizona.”

He said stiff penalties in a number of hostage-taking cases handed out in state and federal courts also deterred smugglers from holding illegal immigrants in drophouses.

In 2009, a Mexican national was sentenced to 107 years in federal prison for being part of a violent smuggling group that beat, pistol-whipped and threatened to kill a group of 23 illegal immigrants they were holding hostage inside a Phoenix drophouse, according to ICE.

Another factor in the decrease of the number of illegal immigrants found inside drophouses may be that smugglers don’t want to risk losing large numbers of illegal immigrants in case the drophouse is discovered, Allen said.

“You remember the days here when we were hitting drophouses that had 60, 80 or more than 100 people in them,” Allen said. “These days, it’s very rare that we see a drophouse that has more than 20 or 30 people in it.”

Still, Allen said, “that doesn’t mean that there’s none out there.”

So far this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, immigration officials have found 134 illegal immigrants in 11 drophouses, ICE said. Two of those drophouses involved illegal immigrants who were being held against their will.

Most recently, ICE officials, with help from Phoenix police, found 14 illegal immigrants held hostage in a drophouse in the 7900 block of West Highland Avenue, near 80th Avenue and Camelback Road.

The drophouse was discovered after ICE officials in Atlanta received a call from a woman who said her niece was being held hostage inside the house.

New tactics

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose office operates a unit targeting criminal organizations that smuggle illegal immigrants, said he also has seen a decrease in drophouses recently.

Deputies from the Sheriff’s Office discovered five drophouses in 2012, down from eight the year before.

Arpaio, however, said he believes fewer drophouses being discovered is an indication that smugglers have changed their tactics. To avoid detection because of stepped-up immigration enforcement in Maricopa County, he believes smugglers are bypassing the Phoenix area.

“They just changed their method,” Arpaio said. “Instead of hanging around Phoenix, they are just going directly” to other cities.

The office’s human-smuggling unit continues to find smuggling vehicles loaded with illegal immigrants on highways that pass through Maricopa County, Arpaio said.

During the unit’s most recent 30-day operation, deputies apprehended 75 illegal immigrants being transported in smuggling vehicles through Maricopa County, Arpaio said.

Still, the overall number of illegal immigrants apprehended by the unit is down; 381 this year compared with 831 last year, according to figures provided by Arpaio’s office.

A shift to Texas

Meanwhile, Border Patrol apprehensions were down 3 percent last year in the Tucson Sector but up 15 percent in the Yuma Sector, according to data for Oct. 1, 2011, through July 31, 2012. Data for the entire year is not yet available.

In the Tucson Sector, the nation’s busiest for illegal border crossings, there were 105,343 apprehensions from Oct. 1 through July 31, compared with 109,005 during the same period the year before.

In the Yuma Sector, apprehensions increased from 5,061 during the first 10 months of fiscal 2011 to 5,837 through July 31 of fiscal 2012.

There are indications that some of the illegal-immigration traffic that used to pass through Arizona has moved to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

“That part of the United States has seen an increase in apprehensions over the last few years so, to a certain extent, there has been a shift out of Arizona,” Allen said.

Border Patrol statistics show that apprehensions of illegal immigrants in the Rio Grande Valley Sector increased from 48,487 during the first 10 months of fiscal 2011 to 79,719 during the same period of fiscal 2012. The sector covers 18 counties in southeastern Texas.

Beginning in February, ICE officials began to see a sudden increase in the number of drophouses discovered in the Rio Grande Valley, mostly in Hidalgo and Cameron counties, said Nina Pruneda, an ICE spokeswoman in Texas.

Since then, ICE officials have discovered several dozen drophouses, some with more than 60 people inside, although the number of drophouses being discovered seems to have tapered off recently, Pruneda said.

Pruneda said the increase in that area is an indication that illegal immigration from Mexico has increased in southern Texas, but she said it’s unclear if that increase is a result of a shift from Arizona.

Charges of violence

In Arizona, most of the drophouses discovered in the Phoenix area have been clustered in west Phoenix near the Interstate 10 corridor or in Mesa near U.S. 60, Allen said.

In the most recent case, the woman who called ICE officials in Atlanta said a smuggler had contacted her and said her niece was being held in the drophouse in Phoenix and she would be killed unless the woman paid the smuggler $4,000, according to ICE officials.

Over the next two days, ICE investigators located the drophouse on West Highland Avenue. When ICE agents and Phoenix police raided the house, the three smugglers attempted to flee through a back door and then ran back inside, according to ICE officials.

ICE agents arrested three Mexican nationals, Francisco Javier Astorga-Velarde, 22, Jose Pedro Soto Valdez, 32, and Noel Galdinez-Marmolejo, 32, according to ICE officials. They were charged with conspiring to harbor illegal aliens, according to ICE officials.

According to ICE, Astorga-Velarde is believed to have served as the “boss” of the house. He is accused of calling the woman and threatening to kill her niece unless he was paid $4,000. He is also accused of hitting two illegal immigrants being held in the house in the face with a gun. In addition, he faces allegations of threatening to sexually assault a female illegal immigrant and threatening to cut her into pieces and throw her in the trash, according to ICE.

Galdinez-Marmolejo is accused of hitting one of the male victims with a gun on the head, face, hands and feet. Soto Valdez is accused of beating a male victim with a gun and threatening to sexually assault, cut, kill or sell female victims if their smuggling fees were not paid, according to ICE.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/20121217phoenix-area-illegal-immigrant-activity-waning.html?nclick_check=1

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With Stickers, a Petition and Even a Middle Name, Secession Fever Hits Texas

28
Nov 2012

In the weeks since President Obama’s re-election, Republicans around the country have been wondering how to proceed. Some conservatives in Texas have been asking a far more pointed question: how to secede.

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Sales of bumper stickers reading “Secede” — one for $2, or three for $5 — have increased at TexasSecede.com. In East Texas, a Republican official sent out an e-mail newsletter saying it was time for Texas and Vermont to each “go her own way in peace” and sign a free-trade agreement among the states.

A petition calling for secession that was filed by a Texas man on a White House Web site has received tens of thousands of signatures, and the Obama administration must now issue a response. And Larry Scott Kilgore, a perennial Republican candidate from Arlington, a Dallas suburb, announced that he was running for governor in 2014 and would legally change his name to Larry Secede Kilgore, with Secede in capital letters. As his Web page,secedekilgore.com, puts it: “Secession! All other issues can be dealt with later.”

In Texas, talk of secession in recent years has steadily shifted to the center from the fringe right. It has emerged as an echo of the state Republican leadership’s anti-Washington, pro-Texas-sovereignty mantra on a variety of issues, including health care and environmental regulations.

But for other proponents of secession and its sister ideology, Texas nationalism — a focus of the Texas Nationalist Movement and other groups that want the state to become an independent nation, as it was in the 1830s and 1840s — it is a far more serious matter.

The secession movement in Texas is divergent, with differences in goals and tactics. One group, the Republic of Texas, says that secession is unnecessary because, it claims, Texas is an independent nation that was illegally annexed by the United States in 1845. (The group’s leader and other followers waged a weeklong standoff with the Texas Rangers in 1997 that left one of its members dead.) Mr. Kilgore, the candidate who is changing his middle name, said he had not signed the White House petition because he did not believe that Texans needed to ask Washington for permission to leave.

“Our economy is about 30 percent larger than that of Australia,” said Mr. Kilgore, 48, a telecommunications contractor.

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Affirmative Action and ‘Victimized’ Whites

06
Oct 2012

On Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court will once again consider the merits of affirmative action and the plight of purportedly victimized whites, ripping the scab from a deep and scarcely healed American wound.

The ever-contentious debate sparked anew by Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is likely to overshadow recent figures showing the widening household-income gap between non-Hispanic whites and African-Americans and the stubbornly low black and Latino high-school graduation rates that persistently keep higher education out of the reach of millions. A new study from the Schott Foundation for Public Education found that just 52 percent of black and 58 percent of Latino males graduate from high school in four years, compared with 78 percent of non-Latino whites.

 

Against this backdrop of pain, inequality, and upheaval, fear of white disenfranchisement seems oddly out of place. The cold numbers do little to illuminate the suffering of many people across the country who have the misfortune of being born into underresourced and woefully neglected school districts. Those districts remain overwhelmingly populated by blacks and Latinos.

Still, in the face of gaping inequality, African-Americans and Latinos can once again serve as the convenient scapegoats for individual failings. Had Abigail Noel Fisher finished in the top 10 percent of her high-school class, she would, as a Texas resident, have been automatically admitted to one of the state’s public colleges or universities. Because she did not, she had to compete for one of the remaining open seats. In failing to win one of those, she found an easy target: the growing number of minority students living in the state who were admitted to the university under a plan for the remaining open seats that considers race as one factor among many, including leadership, geography, socioeconomic background, and special talents.

The university’s cohesive approach is endorsed by many of the nation’s leading institutions of higher learning, including Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Yale Universities, the Universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a joint amicus brief filed in the case, the institutions supported the consideration of all aspects of an applicant’s background, including, in some instances, race and ethnicity.

“Although amici differ in many ways, they speak with one voice to the profound importance of a diverse student body—including racial diversity—for their educational missions,” the brief states. “In amici’s experience, a diverse student body adds significantly to the rigor and depth of students’ educational experience. Diversity encourages students to question their own assumptions, to test received truths, and to appreciate the spectacular complexity of the modern world.”

In Texas, where more than half of the population is nonwhite and 38 percent are Latino, the state’s diversity plan was beginning to bear fruit. From 2009 to 2010, the percentage of Latino freshmen at the University of Texas at Austin increased from 20.8 percent to 23.1 percent. Still, Latinos remain underrepresented in a state where they compose nearly 40 percent of the population. They were 17 percent of the university’s enrolled undergraduate and graduate students, compared with whites, who compose 45 percent of the state population but were 52 percent of the student body.

Since filing the lawsuit, Fisher has gone on to graduate from Louisiana State University, but perhaps not from a sense that she, as a white American, was entitled to enrollment in the state’s most selective public university. As she garners headlines, the continuing plight of the nameless, faceless black and Latino youths in broken schools will languish in the shadows, as will the collateral damage: the wasted human capital and disproportionate number who will fill the nation’s prisons and unemployment rolls. It’s been nearly six decades since they’ve had their day in court.

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Sheriffs arrest five men in ICE sweep

22
Sep 2012

Five arrests, including those of three illegal immigrants, were made this week in a sweep for suspects with outstanding warrants by local law enforcement and federal immigration officers.

The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office teamed up with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday to conduct a search for known wanted persons in Cherokee County, according to Capt. Joe Perkins, spokesperson for the sheriff’s office.

The three suspects who were in the country illegally had previously been deported and re-entered the country, he said.

“From time to time Homeland Security, about once a quarter, collects outstanding warrants and tries to round those up into custody,” Perkins said. “Whenever they have enough warrants and folks they are looking for, this is something that ICE gets together with our officers, and does.”

The North Georgia Major Offender Task Force also helped with the search.

Two of the three illegal immigrants were taken into custody by ICE for deportation. The third remains in custody in Cherokee County.

Two U.S. citizens were also arrested, Perkins said.

Cameron Lee Sengchanh 23, a U.S. citizen, was wanted by the Cherokee Sheriff’s Office for violation of probation. He is being held without bond at the Cherokee County Detention Center.

Blas Jorge Granato 37, also a U.S. citizen and wanted by the Sheriff’s Office for violation of probation, was arrested in the round-up. Granato has been released on probation, Perkins said.

Juan A. Cerano-Montez, 37, who was wanted by the Sheriff’s Office on an outstanding bench warrant, was also wanted by ICE for illegal re-entry into the U.S. after being deported.

Cerano-Montez was being held without bond for ICE.

Juan Manuel Lucio-Gonzales, age not given, who was wanted by federal authorities in Austin, Texas, on a bench warrant, was a known Zetas gang member, Perkins said.

Lucio-Gonzales’ original charges in Texas were gun smuggling as well as a warrant out of Waller County, Texas, for assault on a public servant.. He was being held with no bond and turned over to ICE;

Martin Heredia-Castro, also taken into custody, was wanted by Kennesaw Police on an outstanding bench warrant for traffic charges. Henedia-Castro is in the country illegally, Perkins said, and was being held without bond for ICE.

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